Navy Revises Timetable of Bombing in Yemen / It now says destroyer was docked for 2 hours before deadly attack

Norman Kempster, David Kelly, Los Angeles Times

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, October 21, 2000

2000-10-21 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- The terrorist bombing of the Cole occurred almost two hours after the U.S. warship had finished docking in Yemen last week, not in the middle of the mooring procedure when it was surrounded by small work boats, the Navy said yesterday.

The revised account of the sequence of events leading up to the Oct. 12 bombing is significant because it calls into question one of the key initial assumptions about the event.

The Navy previously maintained that the attack came only minutes after the Cole had tied up at the dock. Navy officials said the terrorists did not raise suspicions because their boat appeared to be participating in the mooring process, in which small harbor vessels took the ship's lines and secured them to a refueling barge.

The revision raises new questions about the Navy's security procedures, which apparently allowed the attackers to maneuver their boat close enough to the guided missile destroyer to inflict heavy damage at a time when there was no need for harbor boats to be in the vicinity.

In a brief statement, the Navy's information office said the explosion occurred at about 11:18 a.m., well after the ship had completed mooring operations at 9:30 a.m. Fueling had begun at 10:30 a.m., the Navy said.

The Navy has said the Cole's crew was observing the 5th Fleet's second-highest level of alert at the time of the blast. Under those procedures, crew members would have been assigned to watch through binoculars for boats approaching the Cole. Other sailors would have been maintaining an armed guard.

It was not clear why those precautions did not prevent the attack.

The Navy said the revised time line was based on an examination of the ship's records, prompted by a report in the Navy Times, a civilian- owned newspaper.

The Navy Times said it learned of the discrepancy in the military's original account from an unidentified source associated with the port of Aden in Yemen.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, said the bomb exploded at 12:15 p.m., just after the Cole had completed docking and before it began refueling. He noted that the information was based on initial reports and might not be "100 percent accurate."

Yesterday, the last four bodies of U.S. sailors killed in the bombing were flown out of Aden for Dover Air Force Base in Delaware after a quiet ceremony on a steamy tarmac. The removal of the final bodies allows the FBI and other investigators to more thoroughly search the ship for forensic evidence.

Yemen's largest newspaper, Al Ayyam, reported yesterday that two houses in Aden continue to be investigated in the search for those who planned the operation. One house was used to make the bomb, and the occupants had stayed there for two months, the paper said. The other house was used while welding was done on the small boat used to blow a gaping hole in the Cole, according to the paper.